Geotag-to-SLurl App Wanted For Flickr
I’ve played a bit of City of Heroes, but really not all that much, so I was interested to see the following tags attached to a friend’s COH screenshots on Flickr:
• City of Heroes
• coh
• cohtagged
• coh:x=-964
• coh:y=327
• coh:z=-662
• coh:zone=V_City_02_01
At first I was impressed that he had thought to tag his screens this way, but he informs me that the game embeds the information into the pics automatically. “When I upload them to Flickr, it just interprets them into tags,” he says. Interestingly, Second Life resident Lev Kamenev posted a similar idea to his blog the other day. All it needs now is someone to write a quick Flickr app to turn SL geotags into SLurls.
I’m not sure what it would take to automatically tag your SL shots in Flickr (that’s for someone else to contribute), but once you had tagged SL pics there, it shouldn’t be very difficult to write a Webapp that would interpret the tags into a SLurl if you stick the photo’s URL into it or something. You just point your Webapp at the photo and you come out the other end with a clickable SLurl that launches you into Second Life at that location. Might you even be able to write some Javascript that let you create the link on the fly, in a blog post, for instance? I’m not a good enough coder to know. (Or maybe there already is one of these things? The back button for SL that I was pondering in my last post turned out to already exist!)
Of course, screens uploaded to Cristiano Midnight’s Snapzilla come complete with an SL link that launches you into the world at the location of the pic. But both the beauty and limitation of Snapzilla is that it’s sealed off from the rest of the screenshotting world. Having an SL-only repository of screens makes for a great living histroy document, as Cristiano has pointed out in the past. But it also hides that document somewhat from the uninitiated, rather than placing it somewhere where someone might come across it fortuitously. There’s also not an easy way to extract the link to automatically embed it in a Web page, short of a screenscrape, as far as I can tell. Whereas the Flickr API ought to let you extract the tags of any photo pretty easily. Another nice tool would be a Flickr uploader with fields for the SL coordinates Lev describes. Let me know if there’s anyone out there who’s working (or has worked) on these kinds of things.
Feeds
I was planning to write an app showing SL geotags on map with links.
It is very simple, I plan to do it today. I do not have flickr account,
so if you could post couple of pics with SL geotags it would help me
to test.
Awesome. I’ll do that now / soon and post the URLs here.
Another remark: in order to add tags to flickr post, just go here first:
http://www.codeminders.com/~sl/geotagging/taggen.html
enter coordinates and press “Generate tags” button. Then copy
comma-separated list of tags from the bottom box and paste them
to ‘tags’ entry field on flicker or in the uploading application
you are using (most of them understand comma-separated lists of tags).
The only issue I see with Flickr, Mark, is that they don’t consider screenshots to be “photos.” Or have the resolved the issues discussed in this article?:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71119-0.html
Yeah, I blogged about that 3 weeks before that article appeared. It hasn’t been resolved, to my knowledge, but I don’t see it as something that would prevent these functions from being implemented. You can still upload screenshots, they just don’t always appear in the public index
Ah, I see, you’re talking about the historical document aspect of the post. Yes, that would be an issue. Which I think is unfortunate. Why Flickr needs to be a “photo-sharing” site as opposed to an “image-sharing” site is unclear to me. Especially when you could easily require users to choose between options such as “photo, screenshot, painting/drawing, other” when uploading an image, and then let people include / exclude those categories in their search preferences.
Lev: I just used your nifty little app to add SL geotags to two screenshots I posted to Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20198157@N00/230055792/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20198157@N00/230055790/
Very interested to see what you do with them next.
Cheers, Mark
OK, I have put together small tool to find all geo-tagged objects in some blog (it could be either blog posts or flickr images) and show them. To try it, just go to:
http://www.codeminders.com/~sl/geotagging/findtags.html
You can try to enter there URL of my blog to see locations I am talking about:
http://lev-kamenev.blogspot.com/
To see all sl-geotagged images on Flickr (from all users) you can try:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/slgeotagged/
If you are interested only in your own geotagged images, URL would be:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20198157@N00/tags/slgeotagged/
It works with Imageshack as well! Try my profile:
http://profile.imageshack.us/user/lev_kamenev
You can also try to enter any blog URL or Flickr page which have RSS feed.
The application is quick-and-dirty demo, I will polish it later as time permits.
I think it is pretty cool. If we can somehow can promote the idea and make more pople tag their SL images, in future many interesting applications could be built on top of that data.
Lev.
I’ve put all this information into separate post on my blog:
http://lev-kamenev.blogspot.com/2006/08/visualizing-second-life-geotags.html
Mark, this post keeps showing up in Bloglines as recently updated. It’s happened perhaps a dozen times. Have you been tweaking it or is there perhaps a bug somewhere in your blog software or in Bloglines?
Hm, that’s annoying. No, I haven’t been tweaking it. Perhaps it’s the comments? No idea, really.